University of California Forms Largest Donor Bloc for Hillary Clinton

According to an FEC report, University of California employees and affiliates comprise the largest donor bloc in the country for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Edging out Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., by $50,000, employees and affiliates of the University of California system donated a whopping $1.3 million to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

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UC system faculty were the primary source of donations to the Clinton campaign, with their total coming in around $360,000. Undergraduate students donated approximately $14,000 to Hillary’s campaign.

Mark Petersen, the chair of UCLA’s public policy department, argues that UC system’s large faculty is the reason why their donation total is so high. The UC system operates ten campuses and employs more than 198,000 faculty members.

Despite this, an overwhelming 70 percent of the donations from UC system community members went to Hillary Clinton.

You can read more about the contributions from the UC community in UCLA’s student newspaper, The Daily Bruin:

According to FEC campaign filings, Clinton’s presidential campaign received about $1.3 million from employees and students within the UC system in 2016. Employees from Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., contributed about $50,000 less than UC affiliates.

The UC does not make contributions as a system to political campaigns. UC faculty and staff are prohibited from using their UC emails when engaging in campaign-related activities, according to UC policy.

According to the FEC, contributions from California were Clinton’s largest source of campaign funding in the 2016 cycle. As of Oct. 19, Clinton raised about $84 million from California residents.

Mark Peterson, chair of the public policy department, said in an email that the UC system’s size explains the amount of monetary contributions to the Clinton campaign.

“Individuals in the UC system make contributions that aggregate to a large number and make the UC a seemingly large source, but that is because the UC is a very large multi-campus university system,” Peterson said.

The UC system comprises more than 238,000 students and more than 198,000 faculty and staff across 10 campuses. UCLA, which has the largest student population within the UC system, contributed the most to the Clinton campaign.

Tom Ciccotta is a libertarian who writes about Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity for Breitbart. You can follow him on Twitter @tciccotta or email him at tciccotta@breitbart.com